The Eastern Church 9781607241799, 160724179X

Citation preview

T h e Eastern Church

Analecta Gorgiana

164 Series Editor George Kiraz

Analecta Gorgiana is a collection of long essays and short monographs which are consistently cited by modern scholars but previously difficult to find because of their original appearance in obscure publications. Carefully selected by a team of scholars based on their relevance to modern scholarship, these essays can now be fully utilized by scholars and proudly owned by libraries.

The Eastern Church

Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church

Arthur Stanley

1 gorgias press 2009

Gorgias Press LLC, 180 Centennial Ave., Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA www.gorgiaspress.com Copyright © 2009 by Gorgias Press LLC

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise without the prior written permission of Gorgias Press LLC.

ISBN 978-1-60724-179-9 ISSN 1935-6854 The book is an extract from Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, lectures

on the History

of the Eastern Church, London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1907.

Printed in the United States of America

LECTURES ON

THE EASTERN CHURCH LECTURE I T H E EASTERN CHURCH

THE Eastern Church occupies a vast field of Ecclesiastical History. But it is a field rather of space than of time. It is marked out rather by tracts of land and races of men than by successive epochs in the progress of events, of ideas, or of characters. Hence has arisen the frequent remark that, properly speaking, the Eastern Church has no history. The nations which it embraces have been, for the most part, so stationary, and their life so monotonous, that they furnish few subjects of continuous narration. The influence which it has exercised on the onward course of religious opinion has been so slight, that by tacit consent it has almost dropped out of the notice of ecclesiastical historians. The languages in which its records and its literature are composed are such as to repel even the learned classes of the West; even the Greek dialect of the East after the sixth century becomes almost intolerable to the eye and the ear of the classical student. Its system has produced hardly any permanent works of practical Christian benevolence. With very few exceptions, its celebrated names are invested with no stirring associations. It seems to open a field of interest to travellers and antiquarians, not to philosophers or historians. Is there anything in such a subject to repay the labour or even the attention of a theological student? Had we not better pass on at once to more fertile and more genial regions ? Can any Englishman, can any Protestant, nay, can any European, be fairly asked to look backwards on a field which the course of civilisation seems to have left far behind ? All this and much more may be said. Yet, on these very grounds, I feel that the Professor of Ecclesiastical History is bound, if possible, once for all, to cast that one backward 55 [1]

56

The Divisions of

glance, before he moves onward. Once plunged in the turmoil of the West, he will have no leisure to turn to the repose of the East. And further, although few may enter into the details of its history or constitution, there are some general points of view from which the Eastern Church may be profitably considered. Out of the blank which the larger part of its annals presents, emerge some salient scenes and epochs which beyond question touch the universal destinies of mankind. There are some peculiar reasons why the study even of the near West may always gain by the study of the distant East. This general view of the Oriental Church—these leading divisions in its history—these reasons for\ devoting a short space to its study—it will be my endeavour to set forth in the present Lecture. I. I have said that the field of Eastern Christendom is a comparatively untrodden field. It is out of sight, and therefore out of mind. But there is a wise German proverb which tells us that it is good, from time to time, to be reminded that "Behind the mountains there are people to be found." " Hinter dem Berge sind auch Leute." This, true of all large bodies of the human family from whom we are separated by natural or intellectual divisions, is eminently true of the whole branch of the Christian family that lies in the far East. Behind the mountains of our knowledge, of our civilisation, of our activity — behind the mountains, let us also say, of our ignorance, of our prejudice, of our contempt, is to be found nearly a third part of Christendom—one hundred millions of souls professing the Christian faith. Even if we enter no further into their history, it is important to remember that they are there. No theory of the Christian Church can be complete which does not take some account of their existence. The proper distances, the lights and shades of the foreground which we ourselves occupy, of the prospect which we ourselves overlook, cannot be rightly represented without bearing in mind the enormous, dark, perhaps unintelligible, masses which form the background that closes the retrospect of our view. But the Oriental Church has claims to be considered over and above its magnitude and its obscurity. By whatever name we call it—"Eastern," "Greek," or "Orthodox"—it carries us back, more than any other existing Christian institution, to the earliest scenes and times of the Christian religion. Even though the annals of the Oriental Patriarchates are, for the

[2]

the Eastern Church

57

most part, as regards the personal history of their occupants, a series of unmeaning names, the recollections awakened by the seats of their power are of the most august kind. Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, are centres of local interest which none can see or study without emotion. And the Churches which have sprung up in those regions retain the ancient customs of the East, and of the primitive age of Christianity, long after they have died out everywhere else. Look for a moment at the countries included within the range of the Oriental Churches. What they lose in historical they gain in geographical grandeur. Their barbarism and their degradation have bound them to the local peculiarities from which the more progressive Church of the West has shaken itself free. It is a Church, in fact, not of cities and villages, but of mountains, and rivers, and caves, and dens of the earth. The eye passes from height to height, and rests on the successive sanctuaries in which the religion of the East has intrenched itself, as within huge natural fortresses, against its oppressors —Athos in Turkey, Sinai in Arabia, Mar Saba in Palestine, Ararat in Armenia, the Cedars of Lebanon, the catacombs of KiefT, the cavern of Megaspelion, the cliffs of Meteora. Or we see it advancing up and down the streams, or clinging to the banks of the mighty rivers which form the highways and arteries of the wide plains of the East. The Nile still holds its sacred place in the liturgies of Egypt. The Jordan, from Constantine downwards, has been the goal of every Eastern pilgrim. Up the broad stream of the Dnieper sail the first apostles of Russia. Along the Volga and the Don cluster the mysterious settlements of Russian nonconformity. In this natural framework—with that strong identity of religion and race so familiar to the East, so difficult to be understood in the West—may be traced three main groups of Churches, which we will proceed to distinguish. 1. The first group contains those isolated fragments of an earlier Christendom which emerge here and there from the midst of Mahometanism and heathenism in Africa and Further Asia. In the strict language of ancient theology they must (with one exception) be called heretical sects. But they are in fact the National Churches of their respective countries protesting against the supposed innovations 1 of the see of 1 It must be remarked that a confusion runs through all these Churches from a tripartite division, growing out of their relations with the Churches Itom which they have parted, or which have parted from t h e m : I. The

[3]

58

The Divisions of

Constantinople, Mid holding with a desperate fidelity to forms and doctrines of earlier date. Easternmost of all the Eastern Churches, easternmost in thought and custom always, and usually easternmost in situation also, they supply, in the wild and romantic interest of their position and of their habits, their almost total want of theological literature or historical events. The characteristic fable of Prester John—the invisible Apostle of Asia—the imperial priestly potentate in the remote East, or the remote South, 1 fills up in their traditions the vacant space which in Europe was occupied by the Pope of Rome, and the Emperor of Constantinople. (a) The " Chaldean Christians," 2 called by their opponents " Nestorians," are the most remote of these old separatists. Only the two first councils, those of Nicaea and Constantinople, have weight with them. The third—of Ephesus— already presents the stumblingblock of the decree which condemned Nestorius. Living in the secluded fastnesses of Kurdistan, they represent the persecuted remnant of the ancient Church of Central Asia. They trace their descent to the earliest of all Christian missions—the mission of Thaddseus to Abgarus. Their sacred city of Edessa is identical with the cradle of all ecclesiastical history—the traditional birthplace of Abraham. In their present seclusion they have been confounded, perhaps 8 have confounded themselves, with the lost tribes of Israel. In their earlier days they sent forth missions on a scale exceeding those of any Western Church except the see of Rome in the sixth and sixteenth centuries, and for the time redeeming the Eastern Church from the usual reproach of its negligence in propa* National or so-called heretical Church of each country. 2. T h e Orthodox branch of each Church, in communion with the see of Constantinople, called in the Eastern languages " t h e Church of R o m e " (see p. 66). 3 . T h e " U n i t e d " or " C a t h o l i c " branch, consisting of converts to the Roman Catholic Church. A s a usual rule, most writers of the Greek or Orthodox Church, as well as of our own, in speaking of these Churches, mean only the second of these two divisions; most writers of the Roman Catholic Church only the third. F o r the sake of perspicuity, I confine myself in each case to the first or national division in each of the groups of which I speak. A masterly sketch of these heretical communions, with the main authorities on each, is found in Gibbon, c. xlvii. One exception to this classification will be noticed further on. T h e Georgian Church is both National and Orthodox. 1 See Neale's Introduction, i. 1 1 4 . 2 S e e Neale, i. 1 4 5 ; Layard's Nineveh, i 240. 8 Asahel Grant's Nestonans, 109.

[4]

the Eastern Church

59

gating the Gospel. Their chief assumed the splendid title of "Patriarch of Babylon," and their missionaries traversed the whole of Asia, as far eastward as China, as far southward as Ceylon. One colony alone remains of this ancient dominion, in extent even greater than the Papacy. The Christians of S. Thomas, as they are called, are still clustered round the tomb of S. Thomas, whether the Apostle, or the Nestorian merchant of the same name who restored if he did not found the settlement. In the ninth century they attracted the notice of Alfred, and, in the sixteenth century, of the Portuguese, and it was in reaction from the missionaries of Portugal that they finally exchanged their Nestorianism for the Monophysitism of Egypt and Syria.1 (¿>) The Armenians 2 are by far the most powerful, and the most widely diffused, in the group of purely Oriental Churches of which we are now speaking, and as such exercise a general influence over all of them. Their home is the mountain tract that encircles Ararat.3 But, though distinct from all surrounding nations, they yet are scattered far and wide through the whole Levant, extending their episcopate, and carrying on at the same time the chief trade of Asia. A race, a church, of merchant princes, they are in quietness, in wealth, in steadiness, the " Q u a k e r s " of the East, the "Jews," if one may so call them, of the Oriental Church. They were converted by Gregory the Illuminator in the fourth century, whose dead hand is still used for continuing the succession of the patriarchs. The seat of the patriarchate is Etchmiazin, their sacred city.* Their canonical scriptures include two books in the Old and two in the New Testament acknowledged by no other Church; the history of Joseph and Asenath, the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, the Epistle of the Corinthians to S. Paul, and the third Epistle of S. Paul to the Corinthians.5 Of the extreme Oriental Churches, they 1 See Neale, L 145 ; Buchanan's Christian Researches, 7 6 ; Swanston's Memoirs in Journal of Asiatic Researches, i. 129, ii. 235, iv. 235, 248. 2 Neale, i. 65, 104. " T h e Armenian nation is widespread and numerous as the waves of the sea. It is said to number fifteen millions of souls. This may be an exaggeration ; but the existence of more than eight millions we assert with confidence."—Haxthauseris Transcaucasia, 298, 3253 For the appearance and traditions of Ararat, see Haxthausen's Transcaucasia, 190, 323. 4 Haxthausen, 283, 289, 304. 6 Curzon's Armenia, 225.

[5]

60

The Divisions of

furnish, by their wide dispersion, the closest links with the West. The boundary of Russia runs across Mount Ararat. The Protestant and the Papal missionaries have won from them the most numerous converts. They call themselves orthodox. They are divided from the Constantinopolitan Church by an almost imperceptible difference, arising, it is said, out of the accidental absence of the Armenian bishops from the Council of Chalcedon, whose decrees were therefoie never understood, and therefore never received. {c) The Church of Syria is the oldest of all the Gentile Churches.1 In its capital, Antioch, the name of " Christians " first arose: in the age of persecution it produced Ignatius, and, in the age of the Empire, John Chrysostom and John of Damascus. In the claim of Antioch to be founded by S. Peter, the Eastern Church 2 has often regarded itself as possessing whatever privileges can be claimed by the see of Rome on the ground of descent from the first Apostle. The city itself became "the city of God." To the chief pastor of Antioch alone in the world by right belongs the title of "Patriarch." 8 The purely national Church of Syria is represented by two very different communions. The first is the Jacobite 4 or Monophysite Church, of which the patriarch resides at Diarbekir. It has one peculiar custom, the transmission of the same name from prelate to prelate. The patriarch, doubtless after the first illustrious Bishop of Antioch, is always called Ignatius. The other communion of Syria is, in like manner, the representative both of a sect and a nation. The Maronites,5 so called from their founder Maro in the fifth century, comprise at once the only relics of the old Monothelite heretics, and the greater part of the Christian population of Mount Lebanon. Their convents overhang the Kadisha, the " H o l y River" of the Lebanon, 1 The Church of Palestine can hardly be reckoned among the Churches of the East which I am here considering. It is a mere colony of the Greek Church, and its Patriarch, with the Greek Patriarchs of Antioch and Alexandria, resides at Constantinople. Neale, i. 159. 2 Travels of Macarius, 222, 224. (P'or this work see Lecture X I . ) 8 Neale, i. 126. * Ibid. 152, 153. In the doubtful derivation of their name from James the Apostle, or James the heresiarch of the sixth century, there is the same ambiguity as in the Christians of S. Thomas. s Ibid. 1 5 3 A n interesting account of the Maronites, highly illustrative of their connection with the French, as representatives of the Latin Church, is given in the Journal of the Comte de Paris. (Damas et le Liban,

PP- 75-78-)

[6]

the Eastern Church

61

which derives its name probably from this monastic consecration. The Cedars are under their especial charge. But their main peculiarity is this, that, alone of all the Eastern Churches, they have retained the close communion with the Latin Church which they adopted in the twelfth century through the Crusaders. Their allegiance is given to the see of Rome, and their learning has borne fruit in the West, through the labours of the two Assemans. They have lately acquired a more tragical claim on ,our interest through the atrocities perpetrated on their villages by their ancient hereditary enemies the Druses, provoked, it may be, but certainly not excused, by Maronite aggression, or Latin intrigues. (>d) In the times of the early councils the Churches of Syria and Egypt were usually opposed: now they are united under the common theological name of Monophysite. Both alike take their stand, not on the four, but on the three first Councils, and reject the decrees of Chalcedon, and protest against the heterodoxy, not only of the whole West, but of the whole East besides themselves. But the Church of Egypt is much more than the relic of an ancient sect. It is the most remarkable monument of Christian antiquity. It is the only living representative of the most venerable nation of all antiquity. Within its narrow limits have now shrunk the learning and the lineage of ancient Egypt. The language of the Coptic services, understood neither by people nor priests, is the language, although debased, of the Pharaohs. T h e Copts are still, even in their degraded state, the most civilised of the natives: the intelligence of Egypt still lingers in the Coptic scribes, who are, on this account, used as clerks in the offices of their conquerors, or as registrars of the water-marks of the Nile. They also represent the proud Church of old Alexandria Alexandria, though a Grecian city, still was deeply coloured by its Egyptian atmosphere. Its old Coptic name of " Rhacotis " still lingers in the Coptic liturgies and versions of Scripture. The fanaticism of its populace was not Greek but Egyptian. And in turn the peculiarities of the Alexandrian Church have become the national war-cries of Egypt. The " Monophysite " heresy of the Copts is an exaggeration of the orthodoxy of Athanasius and Cyril. For this they denied the " human nature of Christ;" for this they broke off from the Byzantine empire, and ultimately surrendered to the Saracens. The

[7]

62

The Divisions of

Patriarch of Alexandria now resides at Cairo.1 There is still, as in the first ages, a wide distinction between the bishops and their head. He alone has the power of ordination: they, if they ordain at all, act only as his vicars. The Coptic Church alone confers ordination, not by imposition of hands, but by the act of breathing. Alone also it has succeeded in preventing the translation of bishops,2 and preserves, in the most rigid form, the nolo episcopari of the patriarch.8 In the universal kiss interchanged throughout the whole of a Coptic congregation; in the prominent part taken by the children, who act as deacons; in the union of social intercourse with worship; jn the turbaned heads and unshod feet of the worshippers, the Coptic service breathes an atmosphere of Oriental and of primitive times found in none of the more northern Churches even of the East. But there is a daughter of the Coptic Church, yet farther south, which is the extremest type of what may be called Oriental ultramontanism. The Church of Abyssinia, founded in the fourth century by the Church of Alexandria, furnishes the one example of a nation savage yet Christian; showing us, on the one hand, the force of the Christian faith in maintaining its superiority at all against such immense disadvantages, and, on the other hand, the utmost amount of superstition with which a Christian Church can be overlaid without perishing altogether. One lengthened communication it has hitherto received from the West—the mission of the Jesuits. With this exception it has been left almost entirely to itself. Whatever there is of Jewish or of old Egyptian ritual preserved in the Coptic Church, is carried to excess in the Abyssinian. The likeness of the sacred ark,4 called the ark of Zion, is the centre of Abyssinian devotion. To it gifts and prayers are offered. On it the sanctity of the whole Church depends. Circumcision is not only practised, as in the Coptic Church, but is regarded as of equal necessity with baptism. There alone the Jewish Sabbath is still observed as well as the Christian Sunday: 5 1

The ancient titles of Pope and (Ecumenical Judge seem now to belong, not to the Coptic, but to the Greek Patriarch of Alexandria. For the title ' ' Pope " see Lecture III. The title of (Ecumenical Judge is derived (i) from the right of the Alexandrian Church to fix the period of Easter (see Lecture V.), or (2) from Cyril's presidency in the Council of Ephesus. 2 Neale's Introd. i. 1 1 2 , 1 1 9 ; Church of Alexandria, ii. 99-102. * See Lecture V I I . * Harris's Ethiopia, iii. 132, 135, 137, 150, 156, 164. 8 See Gobat's Abyssinia.

[8]

the Eastern Church

63

they (with the exception of a small sect 1 of the Seventh-day" Baptists) are the only true "Sabbatarians" of Christendom. The "sinew that shrank," no less than the flesh of swine, hare, and aquatic fowl, is still forbidden to be eaten. Dancing still forms part of their ritual, as it did in the Jewish temple. The wild shriek which goes up at Abyssinian funerals is the exact counterpart of that which Herodotus heard in ancient Egypt. The polygamy of the Jewish Church lingers here after having been banished from the rest of the Christian world. Whatever, it may be added, of extravagant ritualism, of excessive dogmatism, of the fatal division between religion and morality, disfigures to so large an extent the rest of Oriental Christianity, is seen in its most striking form in the usages of Abyssinia. The endless controversies respecting the natures of Christ, which have expired elsewhere, still rage in that barbarous country.2 The belief in the efficacy of external rites to wash away sins is carried there to a pitch without a parallel. The greatest festival.of all the year is the vast lustration, almost amounting to an annual baptism of the whole nation,3 on the feast of Epiphany. One saint, elsewhere unrecognised, appears in the Ethiopian calendar; Pilate is canonised, because he washed his hands and said, " I am innocent of the blood of this just man." 4 The moral creed of Abyssinia is said to be thus summed up : — " T h a t the Alexandrian faith is the only true belief. " T h a t faith, together with baptism, is sufficient for justification; but that G o d demands alms and fasting as amends for sin committed prior to the performance of the baptismal rite. " T h a t unchristened children are not saved. " T h a t the baptism of water is the true regeneration. " T h a t invocation ought to be m a d e to the saints, because sinning mortals are unworthy to appear in the presence of G o d , and because, if the saints be well loved, they will listen to all prayer. " T h a t every sin is forgiven from the moment that the kiss of the pilgrim is imprinted on the stones of Jerusalem ; and that kissing the hand'of a priest purifies the body in like manner. " T h a t sins must be confessed to the priest, saints invoked, and full faith reposed in charms and amulets, more especially if written in an unknown tongue. " T h a t prayers for the dead are necessary, and absolution indispensable ; but that the souls of the departed do not immediately 1 From this sect, I am told, a deputation went in 1853 to preach their peculiar doctrine to the Taepings in China. 2 Harris, iii. 190. 3 Ibid, iii. 202. * Neale, i. 806. .

[9]

The Divisions of

64

enter upon a state of happiness, the period being in exact accordance with the alms and prayers that are expended upon earth " T h i s may have been coloured in passing through the mind o f the European traveller. But his consciousness of the wretched state of the Church which he describes, gives more weight to the words of hope with which he concludes 1 his account:— "Abyssinia, as she now is, presents the most singular compound of vanity, meekness, and ferocity; of devotion, superstition, and ignorance. But, compared with other nations of Africa, she unquestionably holds a high station. She is superior in arts and in agriculture, in laws, religion, and social condition, to all the benighted children of the sun. The small portion of good which does exist may justly be ascribed to the remains of the wreck of Christianity, which, although stranded on a rocky shore, and buffeted by the storms of ages, is not yet wholly overwhelmed ; and from the present degradation of a people avowing its tenets, may be inferred the lesson of the total inefficacy of its forms and profession, if unsupported by enough of mental culture to enable its spirit and its truth to take root in the heart, and bear fruits in the character of the barbarian. There is, perhaps, no portion of the whole continent to which European civilisation might be applied with better ultimate results ; and although now dwindled into an ordinary kingdom, Hdbesh, under proper government and proper influence, might promote the amelioration of all the surrounding people, whilst she resumed her original position as the first of African monarchies." (e) There is one of these remote Eastern Churches, which still maintains its original connection with the Orthodoxy of Constantinople—the C h u r c h and kingdom, called by the ancients " I b e r i a , " by the moderns " G r u z i a " or " G e o r g i a . " 2 T h e conversion of their king, through the example or the miracles of Nina, a Christian captive, was nearly simultaneous with that of Constantine. Originally dependent on Antioch, its allegiance was transferred to Constantinople. T h e nation bore a considerable part in the Crusades, and memorials of its princes long remained in the convents both of Palestine and of Athos. A t the beginning of this century Georgia was annexed to Russia. 3 2. W e are thus brought to the next group in Eastern Christendom, the Orthodox Imperial Church, which sometimes gives its name to the whole. It is " the Great Church " 1

Harris, iii. 186.

2 4

Ibid. i. 26-31.

[10]

See Neale, i. 61-65.

the Eastern Church

65

(as it is technically called) from which those which we have hitherto described have broken off, and those which we shall proceed to describe have been derived. T h e "Greek Church," properly so called, includes the widespread race which speaks the Greek language, from its southernmost outpost in the desert of Mount Sinai, through all the islands and coasts of the Levant and the Archipelago; having its centre in Greece and in Constantinople. It represents to us, in however corrupt and degraded a form, the old, glorious, world-inspiring people of Athens, Thebes, and Sparta. It is the means by which that people has been kept alive through four centuries of servitude. It was no Philhellenic enthusiast, but the grey-headed Germanus, Archbishop of Patras, who raised the standard of Greek independence: the first champion of that cause of Grecian liberty, in behalf of which in our own country the past generation was so zealous, and the present generation is so indifferent. The sanctuary of the Greek race, which is in a great degree the sanctuary and refuge of the whole Eastern Church, is Athos—"the Holy Mountain." 1 The old Greek mythology which made the peak of Samothrace the seat of the Pelasgic worship, and the many-headed range of Olympus the seat of the Hellenic gods, left the beautiful peninsula and noble pyramid of Athos to receive the twenty monasteries which shelter the vast communities of Greek, Ionian, Bulgarian, Servian, and Russian monks. The Greek Church reminds us of the time when the tongue, not of Rome, _ but of Greece, was the sacred language of Christendom. It was a striking remark of the Emperor Napoleon, that the introduction of Christianity itself was, in a certain sense, the triumph of Greece over Rome; the last and most signal instance of the maxim of Horace, "Grascia capta ferum victorem cepit." 2 The early Roman Church was but a colony of Greek Christians or Grecised Jews. The earliest Fathers of the Western Church, Clemens, Irenseus, Hermas, Hippolytus, wrote in Greek. The early Popes were not Ita'ians but Greeks. The name of " P o p e " is not Latin but Greek—the common and now despised name of every pastor in the Eastern Church. It is true that 1 See Urquhart's Spirit of the East, 157, 169, and an excellent description in the Christian Remembrancer, xxi. 288. a Bertrand's Memoirs of Napoleon, i. 206. Compare Dean Milman's Latin Christianity, i. 27.

[11]

66

The Divisions of

this Grecian colour was in part an accidental consequence of the wide diffusion of the Greek language by Alexander's conquests through the East, and was thus a sign not so much of the Hellenic, as of the Hebrew and Oriental character of the early Christian communities. But the advantage thus given to the Byzantine Church has never been lost or forgotten. It is a perpetual witness that she is the mother and Rome the daughter. It is her privilege to claim a direct continuity of speech with the earliest times, to boast of reading the whole code of Scripture, old as well as new, in the language in which it was read and spoken by the Apostles. The humblest peasant who reads his Septuagint or Greek Testament in his own mother tongue, on the hills of Boeotia, may proudly feel that he has an access to the original oracles of divine truth, which Pope and Cardinal reach by a barbarous and imperfect translation; that he has a key of knowledge, which in the West is only to be found in the hands of the learned classes. The Greek Church is thus the only living representative of the Hellenic race, and speaks in the only living voice which has come down to us from the Apostolic age. But its main characteristic is its lineal descent from the first Christian Empire. "Romaic," not "Hellenic," is the name by which, from its long connection with the Roman Empire of Byzantium, the language of Greece is now known. " R o m a n " ('Paywuos), not "Greek," is the name by which (till quite recendy) a Greek would have distinguished himself from the Mussulman population around him. " T h e Church of Rome," in the language of the far East, is not, as with us, the Latin Church, but the community which adheres to the orthodox faith of the " New Rome" of Constantinople. Not Athens, not Alexandria, not even Jerusalem, but Constantinople, is the sacred city to which the eyes of the Greek race and of the Eastern Church are turned at this day. We can hardly doubt that it was the point to which the eyes of the whole Christian world were turned, when at the opening of the fourth century it rose as the first Christian city, at the command of the first Christian Emperor, on a site which, by its unequalled advantages, was naturally marked out as the capital of a new world, as the inauguration of a new era.1 The subsequent rise of the 1

See Lecture VI.

[12]

the Eastern Church

67

Papal city on the ruins of the old Pagan metropolis must not blind us to the fact that there was a period in which the Eastern and not the Western Rome was the true centre of Christendom. The modern grandeur of S. Peter's must not be permitted to obscure the effect which was produced on the taste and the feelings of the sixth century by the erection of S. Sophia. The learning of the Greek Church, which even down to the eleventh century excelled that of the Latin, in the fifteenth century directly contributed more than any other single cause to the revival of letters and the German Reformation. In Asia and in Constantinople it has long sunk under the barbarism of its conquerors. But in the little kingdom of independent Greece, the Greek clergy is still, within narrow limits, an enlightened body. In it, if in any portion of Eastern Christendom, lives the liberal, democratic spirit of ancient Hellas. Athens, with all the drawbacks of an ill-adjusted union between new and old ways of thought, is now the centre of education and improvement to the Greek clergy throughout the Levant. 3. The third group of the Eastern Church consists of those barbarian tribes of the North, whose conversion by the Byzantine Church corresponds to the converson of the Teutonic tribes by the Latin Church. (a) The first division embraces the tribes on the banks of the Lower Danube; the Sclavonic Bulgaria and Servia on the South; the Latin or Romanic Wallachia and Moldavia on the north.1 Bulgaria, which was the first to receive Christianity from the preaching of Cyril and Methodius in the ninth century, communicated it to the three 2 others. Servia has since become independent of Constantinople, under a metropolitan or patriarch of its own, and in the reign of Stephen Dushan, in the twelfth century, presented a miniature of an Eastern Christian Empire. The Church of Wallachia and Moldavia is remarkable as being of Latin origin, yet Greek in doctrine and ritual; a counterpoise to the two Churches of Bohemia and Poland, which, being Sclavonic by race, are Latin by religion. T o these national communities should be added the extensive colony of Greek Christians who, under the name of " Raitzen," occupy large 1

Neale, i. 46, 47, 69. The relations of the Bulgarian to the Byzantine Church are well stated, though from a one-sided point of view, in a Greek pamphlet published at Constantinople by Gregory, Chief Secretary of the Synod. 2

[13]

68

The Divisions of

districts in Hungary, and form the extreme westernmost outposts of the Eastern Church. The ecclesiastical as well as the political importance of these several religious bodies has almost entirely turned on the position which they occupy on the frontier land of the West and East. This is an importance which will doubtless increase with each succeeding generation. But in their past ecclesiastical history, the only epochs fruitful of instruction will probably be found in the more stirring moments of Servian history,1 and in the conversion 2 of Bulgaria. (¿>) There remains the far wider field of the Church of Russia. If Oriental Christendom is bound to the past by its Asiatic and its Greek traditions, there can be no doubt that its bond of union with the present and the future is through the greatest of Sclavonic nations, whose dominion has now spread over the whole East of Europe, over the whole North of Asia, over a large tract of Western America. If Constantinople be the local centre of the Eastern Church, its personal head is, and has been for four centuries, the great potentate who, under the successive names of Grand-Prince, Czar, and Emperor, has reigned at Moscow and St. Petersburg. Not merely by its proximity of geographical situation, but by the singular gift of imitation with which the Sclavonic race has been endowed, is the Russian Church the present representative of the old Imperial Church of Constantine. The Sclavonic alphabet is Greek. The Russian names of emperor, saint, and peasant are Greek. Sacred buildings, which in their actual sites in the East have been altered by modern innovations, are preserved for our study in the exact models made from them in earlier days by Russian pilgrims.8 And in like manner, customs and feelings which have perished in Greece and Syria, may still be traced in the churches and monasteries of the North. When Napoleon called Alexander I., in bitter scorn, a Greek of the Lower Empire, it was a representation of the Czar's position in a fuller sense than Napoleon intended or would have admitted. For good or for evil, as a check on its development or as a spur to its ambition, the Church and Empire of Russia have inherited the religion and the policy of the New Rome of the Bosphorus far more fully than any western nation, even under Charlemagne himself, inherited the spirit or the forms of the Old Rome beside the Tiber. 4 1 See Ranke's Hist, of Servia. * See Lecture XI.

[14]

2

See Lecture IX. * See Lecture IX.

the Eastern Church

69

II. These are the geographical landmarks of the Eastern Church. What are its historical landmarks ? From the dead level of obscure names which these vast limits enclose, what leading epochs or series of events can be selected of universal and enduring importance? 1. The first great display of the forces of the Oriental Church was in the period of the early Councils. The first seven General Councils, with all their leading characters, were as truly Eastern Councils, as truly the pride of the Eastern Church, as those of Constance and Trent are of the Western. Almost all were held within the neighbourhood, most under the walls, of Byzantium. All were swayed by the language, by the motives, by the feelings, of the Eastern world. Yet these Oriental Councils were "general," were "(Ecumenical," in a sense which, fairly belonged to none besides. No Western Council has so fully expressed the voice of Christendom, no assembly, civil or ecclesiastical, can claim to have issued laws which have been so long in force in so large a portion of the civilised world, as those which emanated from these ancient parliaments of the Byzantine Empire. And if many of their decrees have now become virtually obsolete, yet those of the first and most characteristic of the seven are still cherished throughout the East, and through a large portion of the West. If with Armenia and Egypt we stumble at the decrees of Chalcedon, if with the Chaldsean and Lutheran Churches we are startled by the language of the fathers of Ephesus, if with the Latins we alter the creed of Constantinople, yet Christendom, with but few exceptions, receives the confession of the first Council of Nicsea as the earliest, the most solemn, and the most universal expression of Christian theology. In that assembly the Church and Empire first met in peaceful conference: the confessors of the Diocletian persecution came into contact with the first prelates of an established church; the father of dogmatical theology and the father of ecclesiastical history met for the first time in the persons of Athanasius and Eusebius. The General Council of Nicaea may be considered both as the most significant of all the seven, and also as the most striking scene, the most enduring monument of the Oriental Church at large.1 2. It is characteristic of Eastern history, that we cannot 1

See Lectures II. III. IV. V.

[15]

70

The Epochs of

lay it out, as in the West, by regular chronological periods. The second epoch of universal importance in Eastern Christendom, is the birth and growth of Mahometanism. All great religious movements, which run parallel, even though counter, to Christianity, form a necessary part of ecclesiastical history. But the religion of Mahomet is essentially interwoven with the Eastern Church. Even without considering the directly Christian influences to which the Arabian teacher was subjected, no one can doubt that there are points which his system, in common with that of the Eastern Church, owes to its Oriental origin. In other points it is a rebound and reaction against that Church. The history of the Greek and Sclavonic races can only be understood by bearing in mind their constant conflict with the Arabs, the Tartars, and the Turks. 1 3. The conversion and establishment of the Russian Church, and through the Russian Church of the Russian Empire, forms the third and most fertile epoch of the history of Oriental Christendom. It is enough to indicate the successive stages in the growth of the Empire, the rise and fall of the Patriarchate, the tragical struggle of Alexis and Nicon, the singular development of Russian dissent, the career and character of Peter the Great, hardly less remarkable in its religious than in its civil aspect. Every one of these events teems with dramatic, some with European interest, and every one of them is bound up with the history of the national Church, and therefore with the history of Eastern Christianity.2 I I I . These, then, are the principal divisions of the history, properly so called. But before considering any single period apart from the rest, it is important to observe the characteristics which, mort or less, are common to all the parts alike, and which distinguish them all from the portion of Christendom to which we ourselves belong, whether we give to it the narrower name of the Latin, or the truer and more comprehensive title of the Western Church. In considering these differences, it is not my intention to speak of the special points which led, in the twelfth century, to the actual external separation between the Roman and Byzantine communions. The true differences between the East and the West existed long before their formal disruption, and would exist, in all proba1

See Lecture VII.

« See Lectures IX. X. XI. XII.

[16]

the Eastern Church

71

bility, long after any formal reunion. The disruption itself was rather a consequence than a cause of their estrangement. The theological pretexts, such as the doctrine of the Double Procession, the usage of leavened 1 and unleavened bread, the excommunications of Photius and Michael Cerularius, and the failure of the last attempt at reconciliation in the Council of Florence, were themselves aggravated by more general grievances.2 The jealousy of the two capitals of Rome and Constantinople; the rival claims of the Eastern and Western crusaders; the outrage of the Fourth Crusade; the antagonism of Russia in earlier times to Poland, in later times to France, have all contributed to the same result. But the internal differences lie deeper than any of these external manifestations, whether theological or political. i. The distinction which has been most frequently remarked is that of the speculative tendency of the Oriental, and the practical tendency of the Western Church. This distinction is deepseated in the contrast long ago described by Aristotle between the savage energy and freedom of Europe, and the intellectual repose and apathy of Asia. 3 It naturally finds its point and expression in the theology of the two Churches. Whilst the Western prides itself on the title of the "Catholic," the Eastern claims the title of "Orthodox." 4 " T h e East," says Dean Milman, "enacted creeds, the West discipline." The first decree of an Eastern Council was to determine the relations of the Godhead. The first decree of the Pope 5 of Rome was to interdict the marriage of the clergy. All the first founders of theology were Easterns. Till the time of Augustine, no eminent divine had arisen in the West; till, 1 See " H i s t o r i a Concertatiomim de Pane Azymo et Fermentato," 1737, by J. G . Hermann, pastor of Pegau in Saxony. Jenkins' Life of Cardinal Julian, 302. 2 For the enumeration of dates and events in connection with these periods of history, see the tabular statement at the end of this volume. 8 Arist. Pol. vii. 7. * T h e Eastern Church has a special celebration of " orthodoxy." O n " O r t h o d o x Sunday," at the beginning of Lent, the anathemas against heresy take the place of the curses on crimes and sins which mark the more practical services of our Ash-Wednesday. For example: " T o Jacobus Zanzalus the Armenian, Dioscorus Patriarch of Alexandria, to Severus the Impious, to Paul and Pyrrhus of the same mind with Sergius the disciple of Lycopetrus—Anathema, anathema, anathema." A n d on the other hand, " Fpr the orthodox Greek Emperors—Everlasting remembrance, everlasting remembrance, everlasting remembrance." Neale, ii. 874. 6 T h e Decretal of Siricius, A.D. 385. (Milman's Latin Christianity, vol. i. 75.)

[17]

72

The Characteristics of

the time of Gregory the Great none had filled the Papal chair. T h e doctrine of Athanasius was received, not originated, by Rome. T h e great Italian Council of Ariminum lapsed into Arianism by an oversight. T h e Latin language was inadequate to express the minute shades of meaning for which the Greek is admirably fitted. Of the two creeds peculiar to the Latin Church, the earlier, that called " the Apostles'," is characterised by its simplicity and its freedom from dogmatic assertions; the later, that called the Athanasian, as its name confesses, is an endeavour to imitate the Greek theology, and by the evident strain of its sentences reveals the ineffectual labour of the Latin phrases, " p e r s o n a " and "substantia," to represent the correlative but hardly corresponding words by which the Greeks, with a natural facility, expressed " t h e hypostatic union." A n d still more, when we touch the period at which the divergence between the two Empires threw the two Churches farther apart, the tide of Grecian and Egyptian controversy hardly arrived at the shores of Italy, now high and dry above their reach. " Latin Christianity," says Dean Milman, " contemplated with almost equal indifference, Nestorianism and all its prolific race, Eutychianism, Monophysitism, Monothelitism. While in this contest the two great patriarchates of the East, Constantinople and Alexandria, brought to issue, or strove to bring to issue, their rival claims to ascendency; while council after council promulgated, reversed, re-enacted their conflicting decrees ; while separate and hostile communities were formed in every region of the East, and the fear of persecuted Nestorianism, stronger than religious zeal, penetrated for refuge remote countries, into which Christianity had not yet found its way: in the West there was no Nestorian or Eutychian sect." 1 Probably no Latin Christian has ever felt himself agitated even in the least degree by any one of the seventy opinions on the union of the two natures which are said to perplex the Church of Abyssinia. Probably the last and only question of this kind on which the Latin Church has spontaneously entered, is that of the Double Procession of the Spirit. T h e very word " theology" (deoXoyia) arose from the peculiar questions agitated in the East. T h e Athanasian controversy of Constantinople and Alexandria is, strictly speaking, theological; unlike the Pelagian or the Lutheran controversies, it relates not to man, but to God. 1

Latin Christianity, i. 137.

[18]

the Eastern Church

73

This fundamental contrast naturally widened into other cognate differences. The Western theology is essentially logical in form, and based on law.1 The Eastern is rhetorical in form and based on philosophy. The Latin divine succeeded to the Roman advocate. The Oriental divine succeeded to the Grecian sophist. Out of the logical and legal elements in the West has grown up all that is most peculiar in the scholastic theology of the middle ages, the Calvinistic theology of the Reformation. To one or both of these causes of difference may be reduced many of the divergences which the theological student will trace in regard to dogmatic statements, or to interpretations2 of Scripture, between Tertuilian and Origen, between Prosper and Cassian, between Augustine and Chrysostom, between Thomas Aquinas and John Damascenus. The abstract doctrines of the Godhead in the Alexandrian creed took the place, in the minds of theological students, which, in the schools of philosophy, had been occupied by the abstract ideas of the Platonic system. The subtleties of Roman law as applied to the relations of God and man, which appear faintly in Augustine, more distinctly in Aquinas, more decisively still in Calvin and Luther, and, though from a somewhat larger point of view, in Grotius, are almost unknown to the East. "Forensic justification," "merit," "demerit," " satisfaction," " imputed righteousness," " decrees," represent ideas which in the Eastern theology have no predominant influence, hardly any words to represent them. The few exceptions that occur may be traced directly to accidental gusts of Western influence.8 Hence arises the apparent contradiction, that, whenever the Eastern theologians enter on topics which touch not the 1 This is well put by Professor Maine (Ancient L a w , 3 5 4 - 3 6 4 . ) Compare Hampden's Bampton Lectures, 25. 3 On this point I am anxious to acknowledge my obligations to the learning of the Rev. F . C . Cook, now Preacher of Lincoln's Inn. 3 A curious exception occurs in the catechism of the Russian Church drawn up by the present Metropolitan of Moscow, where the beatitude " B l e s s e d are they that hunger andihirst after righteousness," is interpreted of " i m p u t e d righteousness." (Doctrine of the Russian Church, p. 1 1 2 , translated by the Rev. W . Blackmore.) But I am assured by the learned translator that this is an unaccountable and almost solitary instance of this mode of interpretation in the East. Another specimen of this exceptional theology is perhaps to be found in the account of Peter's deathbed. See Lecture X I I .

[19]

74

The Characteristics of

abstract questions of the Divine essence, but the human questions of grace and predestination, there is a more directly moral and practical tone than often in corresponding treatises of the Protestant West. Chrysostom's transcendent genius and goodness would doubtless have lifted him above the trammels of any local influence; but the admiration felt in the East for his thoroughly practical homilies, which in the West have often incurred the suspicion of Pelagianism, is a proof of the general tendency of the Church which he so powerfully represents. A single instance illustrates the Eastern tendency to a high theological view of the doctrine of the Trinity, combined with an absence of any precision of statement in regard to mediation or redemption. In the Western liturgies direct addresses to Christ are exceptions. In the East they are the rule. In the West, even in Unitarian liturgies, it is deemed almost essential that every prayer should be closed "through Jesus Christ." In the East, such a close is rarely, if ever, found.1 2. The contrast between the speculative tendency of the Eastern Church and the practical life of the Western, appears not only in the theological, but in the ecclesiastical, and especially in the monastic, system of Oriental Christendom. No doubt monasticism was embraced by the Roman Church, even as early as the fifth century, with an energy which seemed to reproduce in a Christian form the dying genius of stoical philosophy. Still the East holds the chief place in the monastic world. The words which describe the state are not Latin but Greek or Syriac—Hermit, monk, anchoret\ monastery, coenobite, ascetic, abbot, abbey. It was not in the Apennines or on the Alps, but in the stony arms with which the Libyan and Arabian deserts enclose the valley of the Nile, that the first monasteries were founded. Anthony the Coptic hermit, from his retreat by the Red Sea, is the spiritual father of that vast community which has now overrun the world. His disciple, Athanasius, was its first sponsor in the West. And not only was monasticism born in the Eastern Church ; it has also thriven there with an unrivalled intensity. Indeed, the earliest source of monastic life is removed even further than the Thebaid deserts, in the Manichean repugnance of the distant East towards the material world, as it is exhibited under its simplest form in the Indian Yogi or the Mussulman 1

Freeman, Principles of Divine Service, i. 373.

[20]

the Eastern Church

75

Fakir. It is this Oriental seclusion which, whether from character, or climate, or contagion, has to the Christian world been far more forcibly represented in the Oriental than in the Latin Church. The solitary and contemplative devotion of the Eastern monks, whether in Egypt or Greece, though broken by the manual labour necessary for their subsistence, has been very slightly modified either by literary or agricultural activity. There have, indeed, been occasional examples of splendid benevolence in Oriental monachism. The Egyptian monk, Telemachus, by the sacrifice of himself, extinguished the gladiatorial games at Rome. Russian hermits opposed the securest bulwark against the savage despotism of Ivan. 1 But these are isolated instances. As a general rule, there has arisen in the East no society like the Benedictines, held in honour wherever literature or civilisation has spread; no charitable orders, like the Sisters of Mercy, which carry light and peace into the darkest haunts of suffering humanity. Active life is, on the strict Eastern theory, an abuse of the system. Nor is it only in the monastic life that the severity of Eastern asceticism excels that of the West. Whilst the fasts of the Latin Church are mostly confined to Lent, liable, increasingly liable, to wide dispensations, exercised for the most part by abstinence, not from all food, but only from particular kinds of food, the fasts of the Eastern Church, especially of its most remarkable branch, the Coptic, extend through large periods of the year, are regarded as all but indispensable—and, for the time, repudiate all sustenance, though with strange inconsistency they admit of drinking, even to the grossest intoxication. And, finally, the wildest individual excesses of a Bruno or a Dunstan seem poor beside the authorised, national, we may almost say imperial, adoration of the Pillar-saints of the East. Amidst all the controversies of the fifth century, on one religious subject the conflicting East maintained its unity, in the reverence of the Hermit on the Pillar. The West has never had a Simeon Stylites. 3. Another important difference between the two Churches was one which, though in substance the same, may be expressed in various forms. The Eastern Church was, like the East, stationary and immutable; the Western, like the 1

See

38-133.

Lecture X .

Compare

Montalembert's

[21]

Monks of the West, L

76

The Characteristics of

West, progressive and flexible. T h i s distinction is the more remarkable, because, at certain periods of their course, there can be no doubt that the civilisation of the Eastern C h u r c h was far higher than that of the Western. N o one can read the account of the capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders of the thirteenth century, without perceiving that it is the occupation of a refined and civilised capital by a horde of comparative barbarians. T h e arrival of the Greek scholars in Europe in the fifteenth century was the signal for the most progressive step that Western theology has ever made. And in earlier ages, whilst it might still be thought that Rome, not Constantinople, was the natural refuge of the arts of the ancient classical world, the literature of the Church was almost entirely confined to the Byzantine hemisphere. Whilst Constantinople was ringing with the fame of preachers, of whom Chrysostom was the chief, but not the only example, the R o m a n bishops and clergy, till the time of L e o the Great, never publicly addressed their flocks from the pulpit. But, notwithstanding this occasional superiority, the Oriental Church, as a whole, almost from the time that it assumed a distinct existence, has given tokens of that singular immobility which is in great part to be traced to its Eastern origin—its origin in those strange regions which still retain, not only the climate and vegetation, but the manners, the dress, the speech of the days of the Patriarchs and the Pharaohs. Its peculiar corruptions have been such as are consequent not on development but on stagnation; its peculiar excellences have been such as belong to the simplicity of barbarism, not to the freedom of civilisation. T h e straws of custom show which way the spirit of an institution blows. T h e primitive posture of standing in prayer still retains its ground in the East, whilst in the West it is only preserved in the extreme Protestant communities by way of antagonism to Rome. Organs and musical instruments are as odious to a Greek or Russian, as to a Scottish Presbyterian. Jewish ordinances still keep their hold on Abyssinia. Even the schism 1 which convulsed the Russian Church nearly at the same time that Latin Christendom was rent by the German Reformation, was not a forward, but a retrograde m o v e m e n t — a protest, not against abuses, but against innovation. The calendars of the Churches show the eagerness with which, 1

See Lectures XI. and XII.

[22]

the Eastern Church

77

whilst the one, at least till a recent period, placed herself at the "head of European civilisation, the other still studiously lags behind it. The "new style," which the world owes to the enlightened activity of Pope Gregory XIII., after having with difficulty overcome the Protestant scruples of Germany, Denmark, and Switzerland, and last of all (with shame be it said) of England and Sweden, has never been able to penetrate into the wide dominions of the old Byzantine and the modem Russian Empires, which still hold to the Greek Calendar, eleven days behind the rest of the civilised world. These contrasts might be indefinitely multiplied, sometimes to the advantage of one Church, sometimes to the advantage of the other. The case of the Sacraments and their accompaniments will suffice as final examples. The Latin doctrine on this subject is by Protestants so frequently regarded as the highest pitch of superstition—by Roman Catholics as the highest pitch of reverence of which the subject is capable—that it may be instructive to both to see the contrast between the freedom and reasonableness of the sacramental doctrine as held by Roman authorities, compared with the stiff, the magical, the antiquarian character of the same doctrine as represented in the East. We are accustomed to place the essence of superstition in a devotion to the outward forms and elements as distinct from the inward spirit which they represent, convey, or express. Let us, for a moment, see which has in this respect most tenaciously clung to the form, which to the spirit, of the two great ordinances of Christian worship. There can be no question that the original form of baptism— the very meaning of the word—was complete immersion in the deep baptismal waters; and that, for at least four centuries, any other form was either unknown, or regarded, unless in the case of dangerous illness, as an exceptional, almost a monstrous case. To this form the Eastern Church still rigidly adheres; and the most illustrious and venerable portion of it, that of the Byzantine Empire, absolutely repudiates and ignores any other mode of administration as essentially invalid. The Latin Church, on the other hand, doubtless in deference to the requirements of a northern climate, to the change of manners, to the convenience of custom, has wholly altered the mode, preferring, as it would fairly say, mercy to sacrifice; and (with the two exceptions of the cathedral of Milan, and the sect of the Baptists) a few drops of water are now the Western substitute D [23]

78

The Characteristics of

for the threefold plunge into the rushing rivers or the wide baptisteries of the East. And when we descend from the administration itself of the sacramental elements to their concomitant circumstances, still the same contrast appears. In the first age of the Church it was customary for the apostles to lay their hands on the heads of the newly baptised converts, that they might receive the "gifts of the Spirit." The " g i f t s " vanished, but the custom of laying on of hands remained. It remained and was continued, and so in the Greek Church is still continued, at the baptism of children as of adults. Confirmation is, with them, simultaneous with the act of the baptismal immersion. But the Latin Church, whilst it adopted or retained the practice of admitting infants to baptism, soon set itself to remedy the obvious defect arising from their unconscious age, by separating, and postponing, and giving a new life and meaning to the rite of confirmation. The two ceremonies, which in the Eastern Church are indissolubly confounded, are now, throughout Western Christendom, by a salutary innovation, each made to njinister to the edification of the individual, and completion of the whole baptismal ordinance. In like manner the East retained, and still retains, the apostolical practice mentioned by S. James—for the sick to call in the elders of the church, to anoint him with oil, and pray over him, that he may recover. " T h e elders," that is, a body of priests (for they still make a point of the plural number), are called in at moments of dangerous illness, and the prayer is offered. But the Latin Church, seeing that the special object for which the ceremony was first instituted, the recovery of the sick, had long ceased to be effected, determined to change its form, that it still might be preserved as an instructive symbol. And thus the " anointing with o i l " of the first century, and of the Oriental Church, has become with the Latins merely the last, " t h e extreme unction," of the dying man. Yet once again it became a practice in the Church, early— we know not how early—for infants to communicate in the Lord's supper. A literal application to the Eucharist of the text respecting the bread of life, in the sixth chapter of S. John, naturally followed on a literal application to baptism of the text respecting the second birth in the third chapter; and the actual participation in the elements of both sacraments came to be regarded as equally necessary for the salvation of every human [24]

the Eastern Church

79

being. Here again the peculiar genius of each of the two Churches displayed itself. The Oriental Churches, in conformity with ancient usage, still administer the Eucharist to infants. In the Coptic Church it may even happen that an infant is the only recipient. The Latin Church, on the other hand, in deference to modern feeling, has not only abandoned, but actually forbidden, a practice which, as far as antiquity is concerned, might insist on unconditional retention. 4. There is yet another more general subject on which the widest difference, involving the same principle, exists between the two communions, namely, the whole relation of art to religious worship. Let any one enter an Oriental church and he will at once be struck by the contrast which the architecture, the paintings, the very aspect of the ceremonial, present to the churches of the West. Often, indeed, this may arise from the poverty or oppression under which most Christian communities labour whose lot has been cast in the Ottoman Empire; but often the altars may blaze with gold—the dresses of the priests stiffen with the richest silks of Brousa—yet the contrast remains. The difference lies in the fact that Art, as such, has no place in the worship or in the edifice. There is no aiming at effect, no dim religious light, no beauty of form or colour beyond what is produced by the mere display of gorgeous and barbaric pomp. Yet it would be a great mistake to infer from this absence of art—indeed no one who has ever seen it could infer —that this involves a more decided absence of form and of ceremonial. The mystical gestures, the awe which surrounds the sacerdotal functions, the long repetitions, the severance of the sound from the sense, of the mind from the act, both in priests and people, are not less, but more, remarkable than in the churches of the West. The traveller who finds himself in the interior of the Roman Catholic cathedral of Malta, after having been accustomed for a few weeks or months to the ritual of the convents and churches of the Levant, experiences almost the same emotion as when he passes again from the services of the Latin to those of the Reformed Churches. This union of barbaric rudeness and elaborate ceremonialism is, however, no contradiction; it is an exemplification of an important law in the human mind. There is no more curious chapter in the history of the relation of the two Churches than that of the Iconoclastic controversy of the ninth century. It is true that the immediate effects of this controversy were transient—the sudden ebullition, not of a national or popular [25]

8o

The Characteristics of

feeling, but atoost, as it would seem, of a Puritan, or even a Mahometan, fanaticism in the breast of a single Emperor—" a mere negative doctrine," " which robbed the senses of their habitual and cherished objects of devotion without awakening an inner life of pitety." The onslaught on the image-worship of the Church passed away almost as rapidly as it had begun; and Che fanaticism which the Emperor Leo had provoked, the Empress Irene, through the second Council of Nicaaa, effectually proscribed. But in the Eastern Church the spirit of Leo has so far revived that, although pictures are still retained and adored with even more veneration than the corresponding objects of devotion in the West, statues are rigidly excluded; and the same Greek monk, who would ridicule the figures, or even1 bas-reliefs, of a Roman Catholic church, will fling his incense and perform his genuflexions with the most undoubting feith before the same saint as seen in the paintings of his own convent chapel. The result is well given by Dean Milman :— 86 The ruder the art the more intense the superstition. The perfection of the fine arts tends rather to dimmish than to promote such superstition. Not merely does the cultivation of mind required for their higher execution, as well as the admiration of them, imply an advanced state, but the idealism, which is their crowning excellence, in some degree unrealises them, and creates a different and more exalted feeling. There is more direct idolatry paid to the rough and illshapen image, or the flat unrelieved and staring picture—the former actually clothed in gaudy and tinsel ornaments, the latter with the crown of goM leaf on the head, and real or artificial flowers in the hand—than to the noblest ideal statue, or the Holy Family with all the magic of light and shade. They are not the fine paintings which work miracles, but the coarse and smokedarkened boards, on which the dim outline of form is hardly to be traced. Thus it may be said that it was the superstition which required the images rather than the images which formed the superstition. The Christian mind would have found some other fetiche to which it would have attributed miraculous powers. Relics would have been more fervently worshipped, and endowed with more transcendent powers, without the adventitious good, the familiarising the mind with the historic truths of Scripture, or even the legends of Christian martyrs, which at least allayed the evil of the actual idolatry. Iconoclas®ft left the worship of relics, and other dubious memorials [26]

the Eastern Church

8r

of the saints, in all their vigour, while it struck at that which, after all, was a higher kind of idolatry. It aspired not to elevate the general mind above superstition, but proscribed only one, and that not the most debasing form." 1 5. Another difference presents itself, arising partly from the same causes, in the mode of dealing which the Eastern Church adopts towards independent or hostile forms of religion. In regard to missions, the inaction of the Eastern Churches is well known. Whilst the Latin Church has sent out missionaries for the conversion of England and Germany in the middle ages, of South America, of India, and of China, down to our own time ; whilst many Protestants pour the whole of their religious energy exclusively into missionary enterprise, the Eastern Churches, as a general rule, have remained content with the maintenance of their own faith. The preaching of Ulfilas to the Goths, of the Nestorian missions in Asia, and, in modern times, of Russia in Siberia and the Aleutian Islands, are but striking exceptions. The conversion of the Russian nation was effected, not by the preaching of the Byzantine clergy, but by the marriage of a Byzantine princess. In the midst of the Mahometan East the Greek populations remain like islands in the barren sea, and the Bedouin tribes have wandered for twelve centuries round the Greek convent of Mount Sinai probably without one instance of conversion to the creed of men whom they yet acknowledge with almost religious veneration as beings from a higher world. Yet, if Eastern Christians have abdicated the glory of missionaries, they are exempt from the curse of proselytism; and they have (with some mournful 2 examples to the contrary) been free from the still darker curse of persecution. A respectful reverence for every manifestation of religious feeling has withheld them from violent attacks on the rights of conscience, and led them to extend a kindly patronage to forms of faith most removed from their own. The gentle spirit of the Greek Fathers has granted to the heroes and sages of heathen antiquity a place in the Divine favour, which was long denied in the West. Along the porticoes of Eastern churches 8 are to l atin Christianity, it. 152, 153. T h e difficulty of arriving at the truth, of the alleged Russian persecution of the Roman Catholics in Poland renders any positive statement on this subject next to impossible. In earlier times the worst persecution perhaps was that of the Paulicians by Theodora, A . D . 835. (Gibbon, c. liv.) * T h e y may b e seen in several of the Moscow churches, and in the Iberian, monastery in Mount Athos.. 1

8

[27]

82

The Characteristics of

be seen portrayed on the walls the figures of Homer, Solon, Thucydides, Pythagoras, and Plato, as pioneers preparing the way for Christianity. In the vast painting of the Last Judgment, which covers the west end of the chief cathedral of Moscow, Paradise is represented as divided and subdivided into many departments or chambers, thus keeping before the minds even of the humblest the great doctrine of the Gospel— which has often been tacitly dropped out of Western religion — " In my Father's house are many mansions." No inquisition, no S. Bartholomew's massacre, no Titus Oates, has darkened the history of any of the nobler portions of Eastern Christendom. In Armenia, Henry Martin's funeral at Tokat is said to have received all the honours of an Armenian archbishop. In Russia, where the power and the will to persecute exist more strongly, though proselytism is forbidden, yet the worship, not only of their own dissenters, but of Latins and Protestants, is protected as sacred. In the fair of Nijni-Novgorod, on the confluence of the Volga and the Oka, the Mahometan mosque and the Armenian church stand side by side with the orthodox cathedral. 6. In like manner the theology of the East has undergone no systematising process. Its doctrines remain in the same rigid yet undefined state as that in which they were left by Constantine and Justinian. The resistance to the insertion of the words " filioque " was the natural protest of the unchanging Church of the early, Councils against the growth, whether by development or by corruption, of the West. Even in points where the Protestant Churches have gone back, as they believe, to a yet earlier simplicity of faith, the Eastern Church still presents her doctrines in a form far less repugnant to such a simplicity than is the case with the corresponding statements in the Latin Church. Prayers for the dead exist, but no elaborate hierarchical system has been built upon their performance. A general expectation prevails that by some unknown process the souls of the sinful will be purified before they pass into the Divine presence; but this has never been consolidated into a doctrine of purgatory. The Mother of our Lord is regarded with a veneration which, in elevation of sentiment, equals any of the devotions addressed to her in the West; but it is too abstract and indefinite to allot to her in the scheme of salvation, or the protection of the Church, the powerful place which is so precisely ascribed to her by Latin divines. The reverence for her sanctity has never crystallised into the modern dogma of [28]

the Eastern Church

83

the Immaculate Conception. Her death, encompassed as it is by legend, is yet " the sleep " (irot/npa-ts) of the Virgin, not her " assumption." The boundary between the rhetorical, poetical addresses to the saints, in the Eastern worship, and the actual invocation of their aid, has never been laid down with precision. " Transubstantiation," if used at all as a theological term, is merely one amongst many to express the reverential awe with which the Eucharist is approached. It is not in the exact repetition of the words of the original institution (as in the Churches of Rome, of Luther, and of England), but in thè more general and more directly spiritual form of the invocation of the Spirit, that the Eastern Church places the moment of the consecration of the elements. 7. A similar turn is given to the institution of the Eastern clergy, by the absence of the organising, centralising tendency which prevailed in the West. It is not that their spirit is less hierarchical than that of the Latin clergy. In some respects it is more so, in proportion as it more nearly resembles the Jewish type, of which the extreme likeness, as we have seen, is preserved in Abyssinia. The Greek priest concealed within the veil of the sanctuary is far more entirely shut out from the congregation than the Latin priest standing before the altar, in the presence of the assembled multitude, who can at least follow with their eyes his every gesture. For centuries in the Church of Alexandria, and still in the Church of Armenia, the dead hand of the first bishop has been employed as the instrument of consecration in each succeeding generation. This is a more carnal and literal representation of a priestly succession than is to be found in any Western ordinations. But the moment we enter into practical life, and even into the groundwork of the theory of the two Churches, the powers and pretensions of the Greek hierarchy shrink into nothing before those of the Latin. The authorised descriptions of the office at once bespeak a marked difference. The lofty terms introduced into the Latin Church in the thirteenth century, and still retained in our own, — " Receive the Holy Ghost . . . whose sins thou dost retain they are retained,"—fill the place which in the Eastern Church is occupied by a simple prayer for the Divine blessing. The expression of absolution, which in the Western Church was in the same thirteenth century changed into the positive form " I absolve thee," in the Eastern Church is still as it always was, " M a y the Lord absolve thee." The inde[29]